Rules for Perfect Murders - Peter Swanson Page 0,20

through blog entries, and it was like living the past ten years of my life in reverse. There was John Haley’s first and last entry, posted on the week he left the store, leaving me in charge. He’d sold Old Devils, and all its stock, to Brian Murray and me in 2012. Brian had put up most of the capital, but given me 50 percent ownership share, since I’d be the one running it. So far, it had worked out. I thought at first that Brian would want to be more involved than he was, but that hadn’t been the case. He came to the store for our annual holiday party, along with attending almost all our readings, but, other than that, he has left me in charge, except for those two weeks a year when I take my annual trip to London. I did see Brian frequently, though. It took him about two months to write an entry in his Ellis Fitzgerald series. The rest of the year he called his “drinking vacation,” most of which he spent on a leather-padded stool at the small bar of the Beacon Hill Hotel. I stopped in often to have a drink with him, although I tried to do it early in the evening. If I arrived too late, Brian, a habitual storyteller, would play his greatest hits for me, stories I’d heard a hundred times already.

I scrolled farther back through the posts, noting the absence of any from five years ago, the year my wife died. The last entry before that event had been a list I’d written called “Mysteries for a Cold Winter Night,” posted on December 22, 2009. My wife died in the early morning hours of January 1, 2010; she’d been in a car accident, sliding off an overpass on Route 2 while inebriated. They’d shown me pictures for identification purposes, a white sheet covering her head from the eyebrows up. Her face looked unmarked even though I imagined her skull had completely collapsed from the impact.

I read the list of mysteries I’d selected, all ones that took place in wintertime or during a storm. At this point in my blog-writing career I was happy to just list books, and not describe them. This was my post:

The Sittaford Mystery (1931) by Agatha Christie

The Nine Tailors (1934) by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Corpse in the Snowman (1941) by Nicholas Blake

Tied Up in Tinsel (1972) by Ngaio Marsh

The Shining (1977) by Stephen King

Gorky Park (1981) by Martin Cruz Smith

Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1992) by Peter H?eg

A Simple Plan (1993) by Scott Smith

The Ice Harvest (2000) by Scott Phillips

Raven Black (2006) by Ann Cleeves

I remembered putting it together, remembered worrying about including The Shining, because it was a horror novel and not at all a mystery, but included it anyway because it was a book I loved. It was strange to remember such minutiae, these insignificant thoughts I’d had less than two weeks before my world would change forever. If I could go back to late December of that year, then I would never have written this list. I would have spent all my time fighting tooth and nail for my wife, telling her that I knew about her affair, that I knew she was doing drugs again, telling her I forgave her, and that she could come back to me. Who knows if any of it would have made a difference? But at least I would have tried.

I scrolled back some more, found another list, “Crime Novels About Cheating,” and quickly checked the date. I didn’t officially know about my wife at that point, but I must have guessed, must have known something was going on at a gut level. I kept scrolling backward, the blog posts coming more and more frequently as I reached the years when I’d been better at keeping the blog updated. I thought, not for the first time: Why does everything need to be a list? What compels us to do that? It was something I’d been doing ever since I became an obsessed reader, ever since I started spending all my money at Annie’s Book Swap. Ten favorite books. Ten scariest books. Best James Bond novels. Best Roald Dahl. I suppose I know why I did it back then. It doesn’t take a psychology degree to understand that it was a way of giving myself an identity. Because if I wasn’t a twelve-year-old who’d already read every single Dick Francis novel (and could name the